Feedback on the Ubuntu kernel for server and cloud

[Scott Moser]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2011, John Johansen wrote:

> The kernel team is looking for feedback on the state of the kernel for
> server and cloud flavors of Ubuntu.  Any and all feed back is welcome.
>
> What are we doing right?
> What are we doing wrong?
> What configs should we change?
> What new features should we included?
>
> And most importantly what are the use cases for any desired changes,
> so that we can evaluate changes in context.
>
> This information will be used to help improve the Ubuntu kernels
> and to help ensure that we have the best server and cloud flavors
> available.

Something I think should be up for discussion was the "flavour" versus
"sub-flavour" status of -virtual.

We moved to "flavour" I think in maverick.  That gave us more freedom to
differentiate from the configuration of the '-server' kernel, but meant
that we couldn't 100% just take the modules we needed from -server, as
Loic pointed out.

I think one of the primary reasons for splitting was to put some kernel
modules built-in that previously were not builtin in the -server kernel.
I'm not sure exactly which it was, though.  I know at one point I had
hoped that -virtual would be a small-ish kernel targetting supporting via
built-in hypervisor hardware (from virtualbox to vmware to kvm to xen...).

There is definitely value in having a kernel that "just works", but a
small ramdisk isn't that bad.

If losing "boot without ramdisk" is the only thing we really lose by going
back to sub-flavour, then I think it should be considered.